Customer Reviews
An Extraordinary Experience - By: D. Cottam, 21 Mar 2008 
Like many, I have tried reading the book & found it quite tough.Jim Norton makes the text come to life & team with unforgettable characters. His voice is an extraordinary instrument capable of conveying every emotional nuance & moments of great humour. His reading is an amazing tour de force.He has an inexhaustible range of voicesin all registers from velvety bass to falsetto. He conveys the multilayered prose with complete ease deploying many voices to convey a sense of place, inner thoughts & an astonishing cast of characters, each with a unique & distinctive timbre, register & accent.Bloom emerges as a deeply sympathetic & vulnerable human being.
Marcella Riordan is also marvellous as Molly. She is vividly realised & her soliloquy becomes a fascinating & erotic experience. Despite their considerable length, I have already enjoyed these discs several times & find each repetition more illuminating.I now understand why this book has achieved its legendary status. This reading is, perhaps, the most remarkable piece of storytelling I have ever heard.
Re-Joyce! - By: Neil S. Hall, 10 Dec 2006 This is an astounding tour de force. Ulysses is a notoriously difficult read but, when listening to this, one is simply swept along, unconcerned about such difficulties as foreign-language quotations, obscure allusions, opaque puns, crazy word-games etc. On the printed page, such things are frustrating for the reader, who feels ill-inclined to continue with a book which he or she doesn't fully undertand. But this brilliant reading places such difficulitesin their proper perspective.
For me, this reading revealed the humour of the book for the first time. The Aeolus episode had mein stitches; the Cyclops episode & the end of Circe made me literally cry with laughter. And,in this reading, the very ending of the novel, with its great surge of warmth & love, is almost overwhelming.
One could quibble about the occasional pronunciation. And maybe Marcella Riordan, who reads Molly Bloom, could somehow have suggested the total lack of punctuationin the final Penelope episode. (Yes, I appreciate that the poor woman has got to breathe...!) But these are minor quibbles. The reading(s), production & presentation are all absolutely first rate. I hope this splendid recording will win new admirers for this great masterpiece.
Norton & Riordan have also recorded a very abridged Finnegans Wake. Let us hope that someday they - & Naxos - will give us the whole thing.
Very tart lemmingaid - By: Iambic Reviewer, 20 Mar 2005 The only real reason to tackle the massive burden of Ulysses is to become aware of the stark reality that it expresses regarding the "spirit of the age", essentially a rampant nihilism. Then one can possibly adjust one's outlook on the current world society & proceed accordingly, perhaps avoiding being a lemming going over the cliff.
Before entering the cavern of this work, one has to decide the "why" as above, then the "how". For me, after much diddling, false starts & self deceptions, this excellent CD set became the obvious answer. I had heard the comments of people far more intelligent than I on how difficult the work was to plow through. Therefore, I would have even more difficulty than they if I chose to continue reading it (a false start at reading the 735 page tome got almost nowhere). Also, I would be displaying a gracious naturein accepting the much-touted idea that "Joyce's prose must be HEARD to be truly appreciated".
The production here is an excellent way to expose oneselfin a leisurely manner to the book's wily trap without becoming totally enmeshed. The trap is simply that one thinks the work is "going to say something", but the fact remains that it really says nothing, albeitin a brilliant way.
One can be tired but still listen to part of a CD, repeat passages at will, turn it off, reflect, then continue. It is MUCH harder to read this work than to listen to it. The CD set also contains very valuable & detailed notes about each section as well as overall enlightening critical information, & relevant musical selections are also present throughout.
If one is truly serious about attacking this work, I would recommend the sort of "Joyce for Dummies" approach that I followed: purchase the DVD of the film version of Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (although the film doesn't boast a very good screenplay & is unrestored, the performances are excellent), as well as the CD audio book of the same title (abridged, but all the important parts are there). Absorbing these will give you a central clue about Ulysses, mostlyin the Stephen Dedalus character that appearsin both (hint: Stephen is a boring, cold, emotionless prig). Then purchase the DVD of the 1967 film version of Ulysses (excellent photographyin a pristine black & white print). Although setin 1967, it will give you a reasonably OK overview of the "story" of Ulysses which is setin 1904.
Having takenin these, you are almost ready to proceed to the CD set of Ulysses, & you can already rightly claim to have listened to the prose of Joyce, definitely a featherin your cap at certain parties (where you may also want to rhyme off a few memorized linesin the appropriate accent).
Avoid the millions of words containedin endless musings about the book, & read only one essay, that of Carl Jung entitled Ulyssesin the book The Spiritin Man, Art, & Literature. If read carefully & more than once before listening to the Ulysses CD set, you'll find that it does indeed contain the golden key to truly understanding the nature of this massively influential book.
Bloom's Odyssey on disc. - By: Mr. V. Thurgood, 19 Oct 2004 Yes.
